Strange Embrace by Lawrence Block

my alibi was a lie. The police won’t bother to run it down too carefully, I don’t think—not with this new angle to work on. So why tell them about it?”
    The man’s gall was incredible. Johnny took a step toward the actor, caught his lapels and pulled him up close. “You were one of the ones who didn’t get a phone call,” he snapped. “Maybe there was a reason. Maybe you were too busy making the calls, Tracy.”
    “What!”
    “You heard me,” Johnny said. “You’re just a little too worried about that alibi. You’re selling me nice and soft but not soft enough. Did you kill her, Tracy?”
    The actor’s mouth dropped open and stayed that way for a second or two. “That’s ridiculous,” he managed finally. “And you know it’s ridiculous.”
    “Maybe. Maybe not.” Johnny’s hand fell and the actor took a step backward. Johnny looked around; the rest of the cast had disappeared. And Jan was waiting inside, waiting for him. “I’m not so damn sure what’s ridiculous, Tracy. You’re a little too anxious to cover your tracks. So don’t tell me what I’m going to give the police and what I should hold out on them. I’ll make up my own mind.”
    A cab came down the street. Johnny held out a hand and whistled. The taxi pulled to the curb and Johnny opened the rear door.
    “I think I’ll take this one,” he told Tracy. “If it’s all right with you. I’m in a hurry.”
    And he stepped into the cab and pulled the door shut. “Go around the block,” he told the driver. “Take it slow and easy, then let me out where you picked me up.”
    The cabby studied him intently. “Sure,” he said dubiously. “You some kind of a nut or something?”
    “I’m eccentric,” Johnny said. “I’m also a big tipper. Except when cab drivers make themselves obnoxious.”
    The cabby lapsed into a hurt silence and Johnny settled back to enjoy the ride. It was a quarter after nine—the meeting had lasted a little less than an hour. Haig was probably sleeping, and would go on sleeping for another hour at the very least. For which Johnny blamed him not at all.
    But that meant, happily enough, that Johnny could dally with Jan Vernon and feel no pangs of conscience. True, Haig was not the only Homicide cop in Manhattan. But the thought of trying to explain the state of affairs to some officer he didn’t know—or some of the ones he did know, as far as that went—did not appeal at all. He couldn’t talk to just any cop. It had to be Haig, and Haig was sleeping.
    So he would wait for Haig to wake up. And what better waiting place was there than Jan Vernon’s apartment?
    None, he thought pleasantly. None at all.
    The meeting had served its purpose, he thought. If nothing else, it had let everybody know what they were up against. The silent agony that Buell and Flood had been going through must have been enormous. Now, at least everybody knew that the problem was not an individual one but a group affair. Somebody was working on them all together. That wasn’t pretty, but at least it drew some of the ends closer together.
    Most of the ends remained loose, however, and that was the hellish part of it. He wondered if he might be missing something. Tracy seemed to be the large unknown quantity, and he tried to decide whether the actor could have been the murderer.
    It did not work out. Tracy could have killed the girl—but the razor meant it had been done with a motive, not merely on impulse. And no motive had turned up as yet. Or, if you accounted for the razor in some other way, he could have killed her on impulse and then made phone calls to divert suspicion, to make the killing look like part of someone else’s pressure project. But that still did not work out. Because Jan had been getting calls for a few days prior to the murder, and so had Elaine James. While Tracy might conceivably have killed the girl on impulse, perhaps with some vague motive at the root of it all, he would hardly have taken three days to